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Democrats are the Party of Science?

Liberal Democrats try to portray themselves as supporters of science, and claim that "the science is settled" on this issue or that subject, labeling their opponents as "deniers". But are they really the party of science? Not so much. On social issues, liberals drag science to the closet, keeping it locked and chained to prevent interference with their agenda.

For starters:

To the liberal, gender is regarded as a personal choice that everyone else must accept, despite settled science to the contrary. "Transgender" is a fiction belied by science reality, and liberals are gender science deniers.

To the liberal, women are fully equal to men in every regard (except in areas where they are claimed to be better). New technologies have generated a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and women’s brains are wired and how they work.https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spr...different.html

To the liberal, ethnic diversity is something to be celebrated, mandated and enforced by government. This despite scientific studies showing that people are are less happy in diverse cultural settings, and would rather self-segregate to be around people with similar backgrounds. Self-segregation happens in college selection (historically black schools attract black students who want that experience, while other students attend elsewhere), housing, church attendance, and many other voluntary activities. Diversity mostly only happens where it is required by the government, such as places of employment and the military. Self-segregation is a personal choice that makes people happier. Liberals are science deniers on this issue.

"If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth." - Ronald Reagan

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

Originally Posted by evensaul

To the liberal, gender is regarded as a personal choice that everyone else must accept, despite settled science to the contrary. "Transgender" is a fiction belied by science reality, and liberals are gender science deniers.

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

Originally Posted by evensaul

To the liberal, gender is regarded as a personal choice that everyone else must accept, despite settled science to the contrary. "Transgender" is a fiction belied by science reality, and liberals are gender science deniers.

So let's see the actual science that says otherwise. Disagreeing with your opinion is not the same as disagreeing with the science.

Originally Posted by evensaul

To the liberal, women are fully equal to men in every regard (except in areas where they are claimed to be better). New technologies have generated a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and women’s brains are wired and how they work.https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spr...different.html

Strawman. It's not a liberal's position that men and women are exactly the same in every way. The "equal" argument tends to be in regards to worth and deserving of equal treatment.

Originally Posted by evensaul

To the liberal, ethnic diversity is something to be celebrated, mandated and enforced by government. This despite scientific studies showing that people are are less happy in diverse cultural settings, and would rather self-segregate to be around people with similar backgrounds. Self-segregation happens in college selection (historically black schools attract black students who want that experience, while other students attend elsewhere), housing, church attendance, and many other voluntary activities. Diversity mostly only happens where it is required by the government, such as places of employment and the military. Self-segregation is a personal choice that makes people happier. Liberals are science deniers on this issue.

So let's the see scientific study that backs up this argument.

And of course the "party of science" argument is generally in regards to things like evolution and global warming. I assume there's not much controversy regarding the statement that the liberal view is generally more accurate when it comes to those issues.

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

The Real War on Science
The Left has done far more than the Right to set back progress.

My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science?

My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?

Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? Yes, the book reveals that Republican creationists exist, but they don’t affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. Yes, George W. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy). Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if you’re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples.

All three are in his first chapter, during Mooney’s brief acknowledgment that leftists “here and there” have been guilty of “science abuse.” First, there’s the Left’s opposition to genetically modified foods, which stifled research into what could have been a second Green Revolution to feed Africa. Second, there’s the campaign by animal-rights activists against medical researchers, whose work has already been hampered and would be devastated if the activists succeeded in banning animal experimentation. Third, there’s the resistance in academia to studying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, which has cut off many social scientists from the recent revolutions in genetics and neuroscience. Each of these abuses is far more significant than anything done by conservatives, and there are plenty of others. The only successful war on science is the one waged by the Left.

The danger from the Left does not arise from stupidity or dishonesty; those failings are bipartisan. Some surveys show that Republicans, particularly libertarians, are more scientifically literate than Democrats, but there’s plenty of ignorance all around. Both sides cherry-pick research and misrepresent evidence to support their agendas. Whoever’s in power, the White House plays politics in appointing advisory commissions and editing the executive summaries of their reports. Scientists of all ideologies exaggerate the importance of their own research and seek results that will bring them more attention and funding.

But two huge threats to science are peculiar to the Left—and they’re getting worse.

The first threat is confirmation bias, the well-documented tendency of people to seek out and accept information that confirms their beliefs and prejudices. In a classic study of peer review, 75 psychologists were asked to referee a paper about the mental health of left-wing student activists. Some referees saw a version of the paper showing that the student activists’ mental health was above normal; others saw different data, showing it to be below normal. Sure enough, the more liberal referees were more likely to recommend publishing the paper favorable to the left-wing activists. When the conclusion went the other way, they quickly found problems with its methodology.

Scientists try to avoid confirmation bias by exposing their work to peer review by critics with different views, but it’s increasingly difficult for liberals to find such critics. Academics have traditionally leaned left politically, and many fields have essentially become monocultures, especially in the social sciences, where Democrats now outnumber Republicans by at least 8 to 1. (In sociology, where the ratio is 44 to 1, a student is much likelier to be taught by a Marxist than by a Republican.) The lopsided ratio has led to another well-documented phenomenon: people’s beliefs become more extreme when they’re surrounded by like-minded colleagues. They come to assume that their opinions are not only the norm but also the truth.

Groupthink has become so routine that many scientists aren’t even aware of it. Social psychologists, who have extensively studied conscious and unconscious biases against out-groups, are quick to blame these biases for the underrepresentation of women or minorities in the business world and other institutions. But they’ve been mostly oblivious to their own diversity problem, which is vastly larger. Democrats outnumber Republicans at least 12 to 1 (perhaps 40 to 1) in social psychology, creating what Jonathan Haidt calls a “tribal-moral community” with its own “sacred values” about what’s worth studying and what’s taboo.

“Morality binds and blinds,” says Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University and author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. “Having common values makes a group cohesive, which can be quite useful, but it’s the last thing that should happen to a scientific field. Progressivism, especially anti-racism, has become a fundamentalist religion, complete with anti-blasphemy laws.”

Last year, one of the leading scientific journals, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, published an article by Haidt and five colleagues documenting their profession’s lack of ideological diversity. It was accompanied by commentaries from 63 other social scientists, virtually all of whom, even the harshest critics, accepted the authors’ conclusion that the lack of political diversity has harmed the science of social psychology. The authors and the commentators pointed to example after example of how the absence of conservatives has blinded researchers to flaws in their work, particularly when studying people’s ideology and morality.

Democrats outnumber Republicans at least 12 to 1 (perhaps 40 to 1) in social psychology.

The narrative that Republicans are antiscience has been fed by well-publicized studies reporting that conservatives are more close-minded and dogmatic than liberals are. But these conclusions have been based on questions asking people how strongly they cling to traditional morality and religion—dogmas that matter a lot more to conservatives than to liberals. A few other studies—not well-publicized—have shown that liberals can be just as close-minded when their own beliefs, such as their feelings about the environment or Barack Obama, are challenged.

Social psychologists have often reported that conservatives are more prejudiced against other social groups than liberals are. But one of Haidt’s coauthors, Jarret Crawford of the College of New Jersey, recently noted a glaring problem with these studies: they typically involve attitudes toward groups that lean left, like African-Americans and communists. When Crawford (who is a liberal) did his own study involving a wider range of groups, he found that prejudice is bipartisan. Liberals display strong prejudice against religious Christians and other groups they perceive as right of center.

Conservatives have been variously pathologized as unethical, antisocial, and irrational simply because they don’t share beliefs that seem self-evident to liberals. For instance, one study explored ethical decision making by asking people whether they would formally support a female colleague’s complaint of sexual harassment. There was no way to know if the complaint was justified, but anyone who didn’t automatically side with the woman was put in the unethical category. Another study asked people whether they believed that “in the long run, hard work usually brings a better life”—and then classified a yes answer as a “rationalization of inequality.” Another study asked people if they agreed that “the Earth has plenty of natural resources if we just learn how to develop them”—a view held by many experts in resource economics, but the psychologists pathologized it as a “denial of environmental realities.”

To combat these biases, more than 150 social scientists have joined Heterodox Academy, a group formed by Haidt and his coauthors to promote ideological diversity among scholars. That’s a good start, but they’re nowhere close to solving the problem. Even if social-science departments added a few conservatives, they’d still be immersed in progressive academic communities becoming less tolerant of debate because of pressure from campus activists and federal bureaucrats enforcing an ever-expanding interpretation of Title IX. And their work would still be filtered to the public by reporters who lean left, too—that’s why the press has promoted the Republican-war-on-science myth. When Obama diplomatically ducked a question on the campaign trail about the age of the Earth (“I don’t presume to know”), the press paid no attention. When Marco Rubio later did the same thing (“I’m not a scientist”), he was lambasted as a typical Republican ignoramus determined to bring back the Dark Ages.

The combination of all these pressures from the Left has repeatedly skewed science over the past half-century. In 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a paper presciently warning of the dangers for black children growing up in single-parent homes, it was greeted with such hostility—he was blaming the victim, critics said—that the topic became off-limits among liberals, stymying public discussion and research for decades into one of the most pressing problems facing minority children. Similarly, liberal advocates have worked to suppress reporting on the problems of children raised by gay parents or on any drawbacks of putting young children in day care. In 1991, a leading family psychologist, Louise Silverstein, published an article in the American Psychologist urging her colleagues to “refuse to undertake any more research that looks for the negative consequences of other-than-mother-care.”

The Left’s most rigid taboos involve the biology of race and gender, as the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker chronicles in The Blank Slate. The book takes its title from Pinker’s term for the dogma that “any differences we see among races, ethnic groups, sexes, and individuals come not from differences in their innate constitution but from differences in their experiences.” The dogma constricts researchers’ perspective—“No biology, please, we’re social scientists”—and discourages debate, in and out of academia. Early researchers in sociobiology faced vitriolic attacks from prominent scientists like Stephen Jay Gould, who accused them of racism and sexism for studying genetic influences on behavior.

Studying IQ has been a risky career move since the 1970s, when researchers like Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein had to cancel lectures (and sometimes hire bodyguards) because of angry protesters accusing them of racism. Government funding dried up, forcing researchers in IQ and behavioral genetics to rely on private donors, who in the 1980s financed the renowned Minnesota study of twins reared apart. Leftists tried to cut off that funding in the 1990s, when the University of Delaware halted the IQ research of Linda Gottfredson and Jan Blits for two years by refusing to let them accept a foundation’s grant; the research proceeded only after an arbitrator ruled that their academic freedom had been violated.

The work of left-wing population alarmists inspired China’s monstrous one-child policy, which included forced abortions and infanticide. (JULIO ETCHART/ULLSTEIN BILD/GRANGER, NYC — ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
The work of left-wing population alarmists inspired China’s monstrous one-child policy, which included forced abortions and infanticide. (JULIO ETCHART/ULLSTEIN BILD/GRANGER, NYC — ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

The Blank Slate dogma has perpetuated a liberal version of creationism: the belief that there has been no evolution in modern humans since they left their ancestral homeland in Africa some 50,000 years ago. Except for a few genetic changes in skin color and other superficial qualities, humans everywhere are supposedly alike because there hasn’t been enough time for significant differences to evolve in their brains and innate behavior. This belief was plausible when biologists assumed that evolution was a slow process, but the decoding of the human genome has disproved it, as Nicholas Wade (a former colleague of mine at the New York Times) reported in his 2015 book, A Troublesome Inheritance.

“Human evolution has been recent, copious and regional,” writes Wade, noting that at least 8 percent of the human genome has changed since the departure from Africa. The new analysis has revealed five distinguishable races that evolved in response to regional conditions: Africans, East Asians, Caucasians, the natives of the Americas, and the peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea. Yet social scientists go on denying the very existence of races. The American Anthropological Association declares race to be “a human invention” that is “about culture, not biology.” The American Sociological Association calls race a “social construct.” Even biologists and geneticists are afraid of the R-word. More than 100 of them sent a letter to the New York Times denouncing Wade’s book as inaccurate, yet they refused to provide any examples of his mistakes. They apparently hadn’t bothered to read the book because they accused Wade of linking racial variations to IQ scores—a link that his book specifically rejected.

Some genetic differences are politically acceptable on the left, such as the biological basis for homosexuality, which was deemed plausible by 70 percent of sociologists in a recent survey. But that same survey found that only 43 percent accepted a biological explanation for male-female differences in spatial skills and communication. How could the rest of the sociologists deny the role of biology? It was no coincidence that these doubters espoused the most extreme left-wing political views and the strongest commitment to a feminist perspective. To dedicated leftists and feminists, it doesn’t matter how much evidence of sexual differences is produced by developmental psychologists, primatologists, neuroscientists, and other researchers. Any disparity between the sexes—or, at least, any disparity unfavorable to women—must be blamed on discrimination and other cultural factors.

Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers found this out the hard way at an academic conference where he dared to discuss the preponderance of men among professors of mathematics and physical sciences at elite universities. While acknowledging that women faced cultural barriers, like discrimination and the pressures of family responsibilities, Summers hypothesized that there might be other factors, too, such as the greater number of men at the extreme high end in tests measuring mathematical ability and other traits. Males’ greater variability in aptitude is well established—it’s why there are more male dunces as well as geniuses—but scientific accuracy was no defense against the feminist outcry. The controversy forced Summers to apologize and ultimately contributed to his resignation. Besides violating the Blank Slate taboo, Summers had threatened an academic cottage industry kept alive by the myth that gender disparities in science are due to discrimination.

This industry, supported by more than $200 million from the National Science Foundation, persists despite overwhelming evidence—from experiments as well as extensive studies of who gets academic jobs and research grants—that a female scientist is treated as well as or better than an equally qualified male. In a rigorous set of five experiments published last year, the female candidate was preferred two-to-one over an equivalent male. The main reason for sexual disparities in some fields is a difference in interests: from an early age, more males are more interested in fields like physics and engineering, while more females are interested in fields like biology and psychology (where most doctorates go to women).

On the whole, American women are doing much better than men academically—they receive the majority of undergraduate and graduate degrees—yet education researchers and federal funders have focused for decades on the few fields in science where men predominate. It was bad enough that the National Science Foundation’s grants paid for workshops featuring a game called Gender Bias Bingo and skits in which arrogant male scientists mistreat smarter female colleagues. But then, these workshops nearly became mandatory when Democrats controlled Congress in 2010. In response to feminist lobbying, the House passed a bill (which fortunately died in the Senate) requiring federal science agencies to hold “gender equity” workshops for the recipients of research grants.

It might seem odd that the “party of science” would be dragging researchers out of the lab to be reeducated in games of Gender Bias Bingo. But politicians will always care more about pleasing constituencies than advancing science.

And that brings us to the second great threat from the Left: its long tradition of mixing science and politics. To conservatives, the fundamental problem with the Left is what Friedrich Hayek called the fatal conceit: the delusion that experts are wise enough to redesign society. Conservatives distrust central planners, preferring to rely on traditional institutions that protect individuals’ “natural rights” against the power of the state. Leftists have much more confidence in experts and the state. Engels argued for “scientific socialism,” a redesign of society supposedly based on the scientific method. Communist intellectuals planned to mold the New Soviet Man. Progressives yearned for a society guided by impartial agencies unconstrained by old-fashioned politics and religion. Herbert Croly, founder of the New Republic and a leading light of progressivism, predicted that a “better future would derive from the beneficent activities of expert social engineers who would bring to the service of social ideals all the technical resources which research could discover.”

This was all very flattering to scientists, one reason that so many of them leaned left. The Right cited scientific work when useful, but it didn’t enlist science to remake society—it still preferred guidance from traditional moralists and clerics. The Left saw scientists as the new high priests, offering them prestige, money, and power. The power too often corrupted. Over and over, scientists yielded to the temptation to exaggerate their expertise and moral authority, sometimes for horrendous purposes.

Drawing on research into genetics and animal breeding from scientists at Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and other leading universities, the eugenics movement of the 1920s made plans for improving the human population. Professors taught eugenics to their students and worked with Croly and other progressives eager to breed a smarter society, including Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Margaret Sanger. Eventually, other scientists—notably, in England—exposed the shoddy research and assumptions of the eugenicists, but not before the involuntary sterilization or castration of more than 35,000 Americans. Even after Hitler used eugenics to justify killing millions, the Left didn’t lose its interest in controlling human breeding.

Eugenicist thinking was revived by scientists convinced that the human species had exceeded the “carrying capacity” of its ecosystem. The most prominent was Paul Ehrlich, whose scientific specialty was the study of butterflies. Undeterred by his ignorance of agriculture and economics, he published confident predictions of imminent global famine in The Population Bomb (1968). Agricultural economists dismissed his ideas, but the press reverently quoted Ehrlich and other academics who claimed to have scientifically determined that the Earth was “overpopulated.” In the journal Science, ecologist Garrett Hardin argued that “freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.” Ehrlich, who, at one point, advocated supplying American helicopters and doctors to a proposed program of compulsory sterilization in India, joined with physicist John Holdren in arguing that the U.S. Constitution would permit population control, including limits on family size and forced abortions. Ehrlich and Holdren calmly analyzed the merits of various technologies, such as adding sterilants to public drinking water, and called for a “planetary regime” to control population and natural resources around the world.

Environmental science has become so politicized that its myths endure even after they’ve been disproved.

Their ideas went nowhere in the United States, but they inspired one of the worst human rights violations of the twentieth century, in China: the one-child policy, resulting in coerced abortion and female infanticide. China struggles today with a dangerously small number of workers to support its aging population. The intellectual godfathers of this atrocity, had they been conservatives, surely would have been ostracized. But even after his predictions turned out to be wildly wrong, Ehrlich went on collecting honors.

For his part, Holdren has served for the past eight years as the science advisor to President Obama, a position from which he laments that Americans don’t take his warnings on climate change seriously. He doesn’t seem to realize that public skepticism has a lot to do with the dismal track record of himself and his fellow environmentalists. There’s always an apocalypse requiring the expansion of state power. The visions of global famine were followed by more failed predictions, such as an “age of scarcity” due to vanishing supplies of energy and natural resources and epidemics of cancer and infertility caused by synthetic chemicals. In a 1976 book, The Genesis Strategy, the climatologist Stephen Schneider advocated a new fourth branch of the federal government (with experts like himself serving 20-year terms) to deal with the imminent crisis of global cooling. He later switched to become a leader in the global-warming debate.

Environmental science has become so politicized that its myths endure even after they’ve been disproved. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring set off decades of chemophobia with its scary anecdotes and bad science, like her baseless claim that DDT was causing cancer in humans and her vision of a mass avian die-off (the bird population was actually increasing as she wrote). Yet Silent Spring is taught in high school and college courses as a model of science writing, with no mention of the increased death tolls from malaria in countries that restricted DDT, or of other problems—like the spread of dengue and the Zika virus—exacerbated by needless fears of insecticides. Similarly, the Left’s zeal to find new reasons to regulate has led to pseudoscientific scaremongering about “Frankenfoods,” transfats, BPA in plastic, mobile phones, electronic cigarettes, power lines, fracking, and nuclear energy.

The health establishment spent decades advocating a low-salt diet for everyone (and pressuring the food industry to reduce salt) without any proof that it prolonged lives. When researchers finally got around to doing small clinical trials, they found that the low-salt diet did not prolong lives. If anything, it was associated with higher mortality. The worst debacle in health science involved dietary fat, which became an official public enemy in the 1970s, thanks to a few self-promoting scientists and politically savvy activists who allied with Democrats in Congress led by George McGovern and Henry Waxman. The supposed link between high-fat diets and heart disease was based on cherry-picked epidemiology, but the federal government endorsed it by publishing formal “dietary goals for the United States” and creating the now-infamous food pyramid that encouraged Americans to replace fat in their diets with carbohydrates. The public-health establishment devoted its efforts and funding to demonstrating the benefits of low-fat diets. But the low-fat diet repeatedly flunked clinical trials, and the government’s encouragement of carbohydrates probably contributed to rising rates of obesity and diabetes, as journalists Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz have chronicled in their books. (See “The Washington Diet,” Spring 2011.)

The dietary-fat debate is a case study in scientific groupthink—and in the Left’s techniques for enforcing political orthodoxy. From the start, prominent nutrition researchers disputed fat’s link to heart disease and criticized Washington for running a dietary experiment on the entire population. But they were dismissed as outliers who’d been corrupted by corporate money. At one hearing, Senator McGovern rebutted the skeptics by citing a survey showing that low-fat diet recommendations were endorsed by 92 percent of “the world’s leading doctors.” Federal bureaucrats and activists smeared skeptics by leaking information to the press about their consulting work with the food industry. One skeptic, Robert Olson of Washington University, protested that during his career, he had received $250,000 from the food industry versus more than $10 million from federal agencies, including ones promoting low-fat diets. If he could be bought, he said, it would be more accurate to call him “a tool of government.” As usual, though, the liberal press focused only on corporate money.

These same sneer-and-smear techniques predominate in the debate over climate change. President Obama promotes his green agenda by announcing that “the debate is settled,” and he denounces “climate deniers” by claiming that 97 percent of scientists believe that global warming is dangerous. His statements are false. While the greenhouse effect is undeniably real, and while most scientists agree that there has been a rise in global temperatures caused in some part by human emissions of carbon dioxide, no one knows how much more warming will occur this century or whether it will be dangerous. How could the science be settled when there have been dozens of computer models of how carbon dioxide affects the climate? And when most of the models overestimated how much warming should have occurred by now? These failed predictions, as well as recent research into the effects of water vapor on temperatures, have caused many scientists to lower their projections of future warming. Some “luke-warmists” suggest that future temperature increases will be relatively modest and prove to be a net benefit, at least in the short term.

The long-term risks are certainly worth studying, but no matter whose predictions you trust, climate science provides no justification for Obama’s green agenda—or anyone else’s agenda. Even if it were somehow proved that high-end estimates for future global warming are accurate, that wouldn’t imply that Greens have the right practical solution for reducing carbon emissions—or that we even need to reduce those emissions. Policies for dealing with global warming vary according to political beliefs, economic assumptions, social priorities, and moral principles. Would regulating carbon dioxide stifle economic growth and give too much power to the state? Is it moral to impose sacrifices on poor people to keep temperatures a little cooler for their descendants, who will presumably be many times richer? Are there more important problems to address first? These aren’t questions with scientifically correct answers.

Yet many climate researchers are passing off their political opinions as science, just as Obama does, and they’re even using that absurdly unscientific term “denier” as if they were priests guarding some eternal truth. Science advances by continually challenging and testing hypotheses, but the modern Left has become obsessed with silencing heretics. In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch last year, 20 climate scientists urged her to use federal racketeering laws to prosecute corporations and think tanks that have “deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.” Similar assaults on free speech are endorsed in the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform, which calls for prosecution of companies that make “misleading” statements about “the scientific reality of climate change.” A group of Democratic state attorneys general coordinated an assault on climate skeptics by subpoenaing records from fossil-fuel companies and free-market think tanks, supposedly as part of investigations to prosecute corporate fraud. Such prosecutions may go nowhere in court—they’re blatant violations of the First Amendment—but that’s not their purpose. By demanding a decade’s worth of e-mail and other records, the Democratic inquisitors and their scientist allies want to harass climate dissidents and intimidate their donors.

Just as in the debate over dietary fat, these dissidents get smeared in the press as corporate shills—but once again, the money flows almost entirely the other way. The most vocal critics of climate dogma are a half-dozen think tanks that together spend less than $15 million annually on environmental issues. The half-dozen major green groups spend more than $500 million, and the federal government spends $10 billion on climate research and technology to reduce emissions. Add it up, and it’s clear that scientists face tremendous pressure to support the “consensus” on reducing carbon emissions, as Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia Tech, testified last year at a Senate hearing.

“This pressure comes not only from politicians but also from federal funding agencies, universities and professional societies, and scientists themselves who are green activists,” Curry said. “This advocacy extends to the professional societies that publish journals and organize conferences. Policy advocacy, combined with understating the uncertainties, risks destroying science’s reputation for honesty and objectivity—without which scientists become regarded as merely another lobbyist group.”

That’s the ultimate casualty in the Left’s war: scientists’ reputations. Bad research can be exposed and discarded, but bad reputations endure. Social scientists are already regarded in Washington as an arm of the Democratic Party, so their research is dismissed as partisan even when it’s not, and some Republicans have tried (unsuccessfully) to cut off all social-science funding. The physical sciences still enjoy bipartisan support, but that’s being eroded by the green politicking, and climate scientists’ standing will plummet if the proclaimed consensus turns out to be wrong.

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

Well, if cutting and pasting an op ed is how an argument is going to be presented, I'll just respond with an op ed for the other side.

How the GOP Became the Anti-Science Party

How did it come to pass that the GOP is in danger of becoming, in the memorable words of Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, “the anti-science party”?

Huntsman, the former Utah governor and U.S. ambassador to China, is the lone GOP candidate who hasn’t hedged on his embrace of science. “I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy,” Huntsman recently tweeted.

Ask Republicans and Huntsman may be crazy indeed. A 2010 Gallup Poll found that a majority of Republicans believe that “God created humans in present form within the last 10,000 years.” Potential presidents Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann see more evidence for creationism and intelligent design than they do for evolution.

On climate change, Perry calls it a “contrived phony mess,” Bachmann says it is “a hoax, voodoo, nonsense, hokum,” and Rep. Ron Paul, another presidential candidate, declares it “the greatest hoax I think that has been around in many, many years if not hundreds of years.”

To be sure, there are plenty of rank-and-file Republicans who accept the scientific facts behind evolution and climate change, but increasingly the party’s base seems to view anything less than a rejection of this science as a betrayal of conservatism. When Mitt Romney at one point seemed to embrace the science of global warming, Rush Limbaugh quipped “Bye bye nomination.”

It would be easy to take this Republican drift from reality and rationality as evidence that the party is comprised of know-nothings and the uninformed. “Anti-knowledge” is how New York Times columnist Paul Krugman labels the GOP.

But in truth there are as many educated, thoughtful Republicans as there are Democrats, people who in their lives and businesses apply strict standards of evidence and rationality to their daily decisions. Perry is certainly no rube, having governed the second largest state in the nation for ten years, and Bachmann is a former tax attorney. If higher education is any gauge, Republicans and Democrats typically split the vote of those with a college degree.

Consider an entrepreneur I know who has a deep reverence for science and enjoys seeing the fruits of chemistry emerge in the products he sells. Yet whenever climate change comes up, he throws up his arms, insults Al Gore, and despite knowing that there’s near-universal agreement among scientists about global warming, dismisses it as yet another fabrication of liberals trying to impose government on the rest of us.

He should know better, yet somehow he subordinates his scientific judgment to his partisan identity.

So why are so many otherwise rational Republicans so seemingly irrational when matters of science enter the political arena? Four factors might explain.

Factor one is a driving force behind so much of what the Republican Party does today, hatred of liberalism. Insofar as environmental and evolutionary sciences are associated with liberal causes, they generate a visceral distrust among Republicans.

This disdain for liberalism has an interesting genesis given that so many red states have benefited from liberal governance in the form of rural electrification, water projects, and transportation infrastructure, and indeed many white southern and Great Plains politicians were once ardent New Dealers.

That all changed, of course, with civil rights, which turned many white Americans from friends of liberalism to its most ardent foes. By enforcing civil rights, liberalism became a literal enemy of their way of life and a figurative threat to anyone who didn’t want to accept the reality of a plural, diverse, and cosmopolitan America.

Add to that the Silent Majority pedigree of today’s GOP — those who recoiled at liberalism’s association with Vietnam protests, campus upheavals, and the generation gap that tore apart the country in the 1960s.

Thus to many Republicans, liberalism ceased to be merely an alternative governing creed — it came to symbolize an alien culture, an America they no longer recognized or controlled, making anything connected with it, no matter how rational or evidence-based, sinister and suspect. “Quite frankly,” wrote Rick Perry in his 2010 book Fed Up!, “when science gets hijacked by the political Left, we should all be concerned.”

Factor two in the Republican denial of science is the anti-intellectual populism that pervades much of the GOP. Republicans routinely deride university culture, describe professors with a sneer, and toss around words like “pinheads” or “pointy heads” to describe intellectuals.

Rick Perry recently gave a speech joking about his poor academic performance in college, as if that were a badge of defiance and honor. The moment Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren announced her plans to run against Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, Republicans immediately started calling her “Professor Warren” as if that title deserved mockery and scorn.

Among intellectuals it’s an article of faith to think critically, yet this is precisely what bothers Republicans who mistake this culture of critical thinking for an assault on American life, which they then take very personally. So in this insular GOP world intellectuals become elitists, people who think they’re too good for everyone else, and therefore no one should trust what they say.

“What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals,” writes conservative columnist David Brooks about Republicans, “slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole.” Or as some Republicans say, the only climate that should worry America is the intellectual climate.

So to these anti-intellectual Republicans, every mention of science becomes yet another boast among the educated, a sign of their arrogance and sense of superiority. Thus scientific evidence becomes secondary to the perceived elitism of the educated class and the scientists who belong to it. Reject science and strike a blow for the little people.

The increasing dominance of evangelical religion in the GOP — with its attendant sense of certainty and unerring truth — is factor three in the Republican distrust of science.

Let’s be clear: science and religion are not incompatible. The Catholic Church has made its peace with evolution and has no problem with the science of climate change. The current director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis X. Collins, is a born-again Christian who accepts evolution and simply sees the hand of God in its creation.

But for many evangelical Christians it’s far more convenient to reject science than to deal with the dissonance between scientific explanations and what’s written in the Bible. To them, science is yet another tool in the secular assault on their religiosity. Unlike the good book, it is not to be trusted. The Scopes Trial remains very much alive for them.

Most remarkable is how these true believers can look at the evidence and dismiss it outright. With complete certainty, for example, they claim there is no proof that the world and its fossil layers are millions of years old — and instead they declare that dinosaurs and humans coexisted on a Young Earth that was created just thousands of years ago. The only evidence they need is in the Bible.

The final factor in the Republican denial of science is the GOP’s total embrace of corporate self-interest — and the fact that many businesses do not want to bear any of the costs required to address global warming.

So rump groups funded by corporations attack real science as “junk science” and prop up well-funded poseurs to act as scientific authorities in the media debate they create. These poseurs seize on any mistakes or oversights among climate scientists to say that the science has not been settled, and the media, always in search of controversy, give them equal time.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce even proposed holding a public trial designed to undercut the scientific consensus on climate change. Such a trial, the Chamber said in 2009, is the only way to “make a fully informed, transparent decision with scientific integrity based on the actual record of the science.”

Saying they support scientific integrity as they undercut scientific integrity is a clever tactic these Republicans use to manipulate public perceptions out of cynical self-interest.

These four factors — anti-liberalism, anti-intellectualism, religious conservatism, and corporate self-interest — create a such a climate within the Republican Party that even those inclined to accept scientific evidence feel cowed or remain silent. Or like Jon Huntsman, they can run for president and garner a mere one percent in the public opinion polls.

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

So now let's move to the issue of genetically modified foods:

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) notes in its statement on the issue that “25 years of research involving more than 500 independent research groups” has found genetically modified foods to be no riskier than foods resulting from conventional breeding. Eating a GM tomato is just as safe as eating a non-GM tomato. The AAAS therefore opposes GMO labeling because it could “mislead and falsely alarm customers.” Though some polling has shown GMO labeling support to be about equal among Republicans, Democrats and Independents, looking at GMO-related legislation tells another story.

The most publicized anti-GMO bill, California’s Proposition 37, was officially supported by the California Democratic Party and officially opposed by the California Republican Party. If you look at the sponsors of the various anti-GMO bills making their way through state legislatures—I’ve looked up every one—the vast, vast majority of sponsors are Democrats, with just a few Republicans sprinkled in. Even at the national level, anti-GMO sentiment is dominated by Democrats. It was Democratic Sen. Mark Begich, of Alaska, who called genetically engineered salmon “Frankenfish” in a 2011 letter, signed by seven Democratic senators, urging the Food and Drug Administration not to approve an application for the salmon.

And also...

Another form of science denialism, or at least alarmism, is “ chemophobia,” an irrational fear of “toxic chemical” exposure in situations where there is no scientific evidence of danger. “Chemical safety” laws attempting to ban bisphenol A (BPA)—a synthetic compound used in canned-goods packaging and in hard plastics such as water bottles, whose removal is leading to the use of less tested alternatives—and formaldehyde lack any scientific basis. There is no evidence that either of these chemicals is harmful to human health in the amounts they are used in common household products. Yet 99 percent of Democrats voted in support of the state laws banning them, according to one advocacy organization. While that number seems hard to believe at face value, it’s not far off: A look through the sponsors of various chemophobic bills reveals, once again, that all but a handful come from the left. https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...nce-too-107270

"If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth." - Ronald Reagan

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

Saying they are the "party of science" is clearly meant to be a relative statement, in essence saying "We adhere to science in our policies better than the other party". So pointing out some individual instances where Democrats aren't exactly adhering to certain scientific understanding does not really make a solid argument against them adopting the moniker.

With the climate change issue, the science is pretty much settled and the predictions for the future are dire. To just ignore this and contradict the science without providing solid contrary scientific evidence is to indeed ignore the science where it's clear that the science should be accepted and factored into policy gives ample justification for the party that adopts the platform to listen to this science to call themselves the "party of science". Just saying "well, you aren't perfect in regards to all of the science" is not really a valid counter.

So yeah, in regards to the Republicans, the Democrats are justified in referring to themselves as the party of science.

Just saying "well, they got it wrong in THIS instance" is not much of a counter.

“The oviduct or Fallopian tube is the anatomical region where every new life begins in mammalian species. After a long journey, the spermatozoa meet the oocyte in the specific site of the oviduct named ampulla, and fertilization takes place.”

The government’s own definition attests to the fact that life begins at fertilization. According to the National Institutes of Health, “fertilization” is the process of union of two gametes (i.e., ovum and sperm) “whereby the somatic chromosome number is restored and the development of a new individual is initiated.”

“Human life begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm (spermatozoo developmentn) unites with a female gamete or oocyte (ovum) to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marked the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.” “A zygote is the beginning of a new human being (i.e., an embryo).”

“In that fraction of a second when the chromosomes form pairs, the sex of the new child will be determined, hereditary characteristics received from each parent will be set, and a new life will have begun.”

“Although it is customary to divide human development into prenatal and postnatal periods, it is important to realize that birth is merely a dramatic event during development resulting in a change in environment.”

“Thus a new cell is formed from the union of a male and a female gamete. [sperm and egg cells] The cell, referred to as the zygote, contains a new combination of genetic material, resulting in an individual different from either parent and from anyone else in the world.”

“The term conception refers to the union of the male and female pronuclear elements of procreation from which a new living being develops. It is synonymous with the terms fecundation, impregnation, and fertilization … The zygote thus formed represents the beginning of a new life.”

“Although life is a continuous process, fertilization… is a critical landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new genetically distinct human organism is formed when the chromosomes of the male and female pronuclei blend in the oocyte.”

******

“[All] organisms, however large and complex they might be as full grown, begin life as a single cell. This is true for the human being, for instance, who begins life as a fertilized ovum.”

“The first cell of a new and unique human life begins existence at the moment of conception (fertilization) when one living sperm from the father joins with one living ovum from the mother. It is in this manner that human life passes from one generation to another. Given the appropriate environment and genetic composition, the single cell subsequently gives rise to trillions of specialized and integrated cells that compose the structures and functions of each individual human body. Every human being alive today and, as far as is known scientifically, every human being that ever existed, began his or her unique existence in this manner, i.e., as one cell. If this first cell or any subsequent configuration of cells perishes, the individual dies, ceasing to exist in matter as a living being. There are no known exceptions to this rule in the field of human biology.”

“… Conception confers life and makes you one of a kind. Unless you have an identical twin, there is virtually no chance, in the natural course of things, that there will be “another you” – not even if mankind were to persist for billions of years.”

******

From Newsweek November 12, 1973:

“Human life begins when the ovum is fertilized and the new combined cell mass begins to divide.”

Dr. Jasper Williams, Former President of the National Medical Association (p 74)

******

“The formation, maturation and meeting of a male and female sex cell are all preliminary to their actual union into a combined cell, or zygote, which definitely marks the beginning of a new individual. The penetration of the ovum by the spermatozoon, and the coming together and pooling of their respective nuclei, constitutes the process of fertilization.”

The Biology of Prenatal Develpment, National Geographic, 2006. (Video)

“Biologically speaking, human development begins at fertilization.”

******

In the Womb, National Geographic, 2005 (Prenatal Development Video)

“The two cells gradually and gracefully become one. This is the moment of conception, when an individual’s unique set of DNA is created, a human signature that never existed before and will never be repeated.”

“The zygote therefore contains a new arrangement of genes on the chromosomes never before duplicated in any other individual. The offspring destined to develop from the fertilized ovum will have a genetic constitution different from anyone else in the world.”

******

Thibodeau, G.A., and Anthony, C.P., Structure and Function of the Body, 8th edition, St. Louis: Times Mirror/Mosby College Publishers, St. Louis, 1988. pages 409-419

“The science of the development of the individual before birth is called embryology. It is the story of miracles, describing the means by which a single microscopic cell is transformed into a complex human being. Genetically the zygote is complete. It represents a new single celled individual.”

“The development of a new human being begins when a male’s sperm pierces the cell membrane of a female’s ovum, or egg….The villi become the placenta, which will nourish the developing infant for the next eight and a half months.”

“Each human begins life as a combination of two cells, a female ovum and a much smaller male sperm. This tiny unit, no bigger than a period on this page, contains all the information needed to enable it to grow into the complex …structure of the human body. The mother has only to provide nutrition and protection.”

“Almost all higher animals start their lives from a single cell, the fertilized ovum (zygote)… The time of fertilization represents the starting point in the life history, or ontogeny, of the individual.”

“Embryo: The developing individual between the union of the germ cells and the completion of the organs which characterize its body when it becomes a separate organism…. At the moment the sperm cell of the human male meets the ovum of the female and the union results in a fertilized ovum (zygote), a new life has begun…. The term embryo covers the several stages of early development from conception to the ninth or tenth week of life.”

“…but the whole story does not begin with delivery. The baby has existed for months before – at first signaling its presence only with small outer signs, later on as a somewhat foreign little being which has been growing and gradually affecting the lives of those close by…”

“In that fraction of a second when the chromosomes form pairs, [at conception] the sex of the new child will be determined, hereditary characteristics received from each parent will be set, and a new life will have begun.”

“The development of a human being begins with fertilization, a process by which two highly specialized cells, the spermatozoon from the male and the oocyte from the female, unite to give rise to a new organism, the zygote.”

“It is the penetration of the ovum by a spermatozoan and resultant mingling of the nuclear material each brings to the union that constitutes the culmination of the process of fertilization and marks the initiation of the life of a new individual.”

“In this text, we begin our description of the developing human with the formation and differentiation of the male and female sex cells or gametes, which will unite at fertilization to initiate the embryonic development of a new individual. … Fertilization takes place in the oviduct … resulting in the formation of a zygote containing a single diploid nucleus. Embryonic development is considered to begin at this point… This moment of zygote formation may be taken as the beginning or zero time point of embryonic development.”

“Fertilization is an important landmark because, under ordinary circumstances, a new, genetically distinct human organism is thereby formed… Fertilization is the procession of events that begins when a spermatozoon makes contact with a secondary oocyte or its investments… The zygote … is a unicellular embryo..”

“[The Zygote] results from the union of an oocyte and a sperm. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being. Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm … unites with a female gamete or oocyte … to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.”

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

Democrats hated new language by the HHS department that said its mission was to protect life beginning at conception:

Pro-abortion absolutists — meaning those completely content with the post-1973 regime of essentially unrestricted abortion-on-demand at any point in pregnancy — are disproportionately Democrats who, they say, constitute the Party of Science. They are aghast that the Department of Health and Human Services now refers to protecting people at "every stage of life, beginning at conception." This, however, is elementary biology, not abstruse theology: Something living begins then — this is why it is called conception. And absent a natural malfunction or intentional intervention (abortion), conception results in a human birth.

Democrats ignore science that shows the unborn feel pain as early as 20 weeks of development, and refuse to consider that unborn babies are viable much earlier:

On Oct. 3, the House passed (237 to 189) the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act banning abortions (with the usual exceptions concerning rape, incest and the life of the mother) after the 20th week. The act's supposition is that by then the fetus will feel pain when experiencing the violence of being aborted, and that this matters. Of course, pro-abortion absolutists consider the phrase "unborn child" oxymoronic, believing that from conception until the instant of delivery, the pre-born infant is mere "fetal material," as devoid of moral significance as would be a tumor in the (if they will pardon the provocative expression) mother.

Whether a 20-week fetus has neurological pathways sufficient for feeling pain is surely a question that science can answer, if it has not already. Already there are myriad intrauterine medical procedures, some involving anesthesia: Doctors can heal lives that America's extremely permissive abortion law says can be terminated with impunity. Only seven nations allow unrestricted abortion after 20 weeks. Most European nations restrict abortions by at least week 13. France and Germany are very restrictive after 12, Sweden after 18.

Getting a scientific answer to the pain question, even if it is "yes," should gratify the Party of Science. If the answer is "yes," those who think fetal suffering is irrelevant can explain why they do.

New medical technologies and techniques are lowering the age of viability. And increasingly vivid sonograms, showing beating hearts and moving fingers, make it increasingly difficult to argue that the "fetal material" is at no point, in any way, a baby. Science is presenting inconvenient truths to the Party of Science, truths that are the reasons the percentage of pregnancies aborted is the smallest since 1973.

Nice try but if you read the article, it's pretty clear that the poll was not asking them a scientific question using the scientific definition of "life" but was clearly asking them when they thought the unborn qualified as "life" in terms of being deserving of the legal protections that people typically received.

They were not being asked a scientific question and therefore were not providing answers regarding their scientific beliefs.

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

Originally Posted by mican333

Nice try but if you read the article, it's pretty clear that the poll was not asking them a scientific question using the scientific definition of "life" but was clearly asking them when they thought the unborn qualified as "life" in terms of being deserving of the legal protections that people typically received.

They were not being asked a scientific question and therefore were not providing answers regarding their scientific beliefs.

Bullsh1t. Read the methodology and actual poll question.

"If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth." - Ronald Reagan

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

Originally Posted by evensaul

Bullsh1t. Read the methodology and actual poll question.

i did. It is CLEARLY a poll regarding abortion and therefore all of the participants were well aware that when the term "life" was forwarded, it was in regards to the abortion debate and they were not being asked to give their best understanding of scientific fact.

In fact, there was even a poll question asking whether the belief that life begins at conception is a religious belief or a scientific fact with the participants pretty evenly split so the poll itself was not demanding that they view the issue of when life begins from a scientific perspective.

It was OBVIOUSLY NOT a poll seeking to find out people's understanding of scientific fact and cannot reasonably be used as such.

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

The poll question was very simple: "Do you believe life begins: At conception, within the first three months, between three and six months, when a fetus is viable and can live
outside the womb, or when a baby is born."

Democrat respondents either 1) did not believe human life begins at conception, or 2) refused to acknowledge scientific fact because of their political views.

Democrats are either ignorant of the science or deny the science in favor of their political beliefs. Either way, Democrats are not the party of science. They are science deniers.

"If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth." - Ronald Reagan

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

Originally Posted by evensaul

The poll question was very simple: "Do you believe life begins: At conception, within the first three months, between three and six months, when a fetus is viable and can live
outside the womb, or when a baby is born."

And as I supported, given the context of the polling, which is CLEARLY regards to the abortion controversy, "life begins" would likely be interpreted as "when the fetus has attained the right to life and should be legally protected". The polling in no way restricted the term "life begins" to a scientific perspective. Again, there was a question on whether one's view on "life begins at conception" was a religious or scientific view so it was clearly not dictating that the question be viewed from a strictly scientific perspective and given the context, people likely would not be viewing it that way.

So again, one cannot use this poll as support for a group's scientific understanding of the issue.

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

Originally Posted by mican333

And as I supported, given the context of the polling, which is CLEARLY regards to the abortion controversy, "life begins" would likely be interpreted as "when the fetus has attained the right to life and should be legally protected". The polling in no way restricted the term "life begins" to a scientific perspective. Again, there was a question on whether one's view on "life begins at conception" was a religious or scientific view so it was clearly not dictating that the question be viewed from a strictly scientific perspective and given the context, people likely would not be viewing it that way.

So again, one cannot use this poll as support for a group's scientific understanding of the issue.

The above is not a rebuttal of my previous post. You can (essentially) argue all you want that democrat respondents were too stupid to understand or respond to a simple question about science fact, but that doesn't change the obvious logic that they either 1) did not know the science, or 2) lied to support their political views, rejecting the science involved. You lose, Mican. I'm moving on.

"If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth." - Ronald Reagan

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

Originally Posted by evensaul

The above is not a rebuttal of my previous post. You can (essentially) argue all you want that democrat respondents were too stupid to understand or respond to a simple question about science fact, but that doesn't change the obvious logic that they either 1) did not know the science

As I said twice previously and now third time, the question was not presented in a scientific context and therefore was not asking them their scientific viewpoint on the issue.

AGAIN, one of the questions even asked if the view was religious or scientific so OBVIOUSLY THE ISSUE WAS NOT EVEN INTENDED TO BE PRESENTED IN A PURELY SCIENTIFIC WAY.

Originally Posted by evensaul

You lose, Mican. I'm moving on.

No. You lose. I supported that the poll was not a scientific poll and therefore is not a valid basis to assess a group's scientific knowledge. Whether you want to try to defeat what I've supported or just move on and let my support stand is up to you.

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

By labeling doomsday global warming skeptics as science deniers, saying, "the science is settled", Democrats deny the basic fact that the science is NOT settled.

"Climate scientists have long known that plants offset some of the effects of climate change by absorbing and storing CO2. But climate scientists assumed that the ability to plants to perform this function was limited because the availability of nitrogen in the atmosphere was limited.

As a 2003 study published in the same Science journal put it, "there will not be enough nitrogen available to sustain the high carbon uptake scenarios."

In the wake of the latest findings, Ronald Amundson, a soil biogeochemist at the University of California at Berkeley, told Chemical and Engineering News that "If there is more nitrogen there than expected, then the constraints on plant growth in a high-CO2 world may not be as great as we think."

In other words, with more nitrogen available, plant life might be able to absorb more CO2 than climate scientists have been estimating, which means the planet won't warm as much, despite mankind's pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
A Stunning Finding

Houlton has been exploring this possibility for years. Back in 2011, he reported that forest trees can tap into nitrogen found in rock.

At the time, he said "the stunning finding that forests can also feed on nitrogen in rocks has the potential to change all projections related to climate change," because it meant there could be more carbon storage on land and less in the atmosphere than climate models say.

The question is whether any climate scientists or environmentalists — who are entirely wedded to the idea that industrialization is destroying the planet — would ever admit this.

That's why that word "paradigm" is important.

As we've noted in this space, the idea of "settled science" peddled by environmentalists and politicians defies the history of science, which has seen repeated upheavals of previous forms of "settled science."

Thomas Kuhn studied this phenomenon in his 1962 book "The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions." He explained how scientists develop a theory — or paradigm — based on available evidence — to explain what they're seeing.

Once that paradigm takes hold, scientists are often loath to give up on it even if evidence piles up that it might be wrong. Eventually, however, faulty paradigms do give way, ushering in a new scientific paradigm. Examples of such paradigm shifts in the past: heliocentric solar system, continental drift, Einstein's theories...." https://www.investors.com/politics/e...itrogen-rocks/

"... in the modern liberal mind, whether someone can be called a science-denier has taken on a scope limited to a small subset of scientific concepts: climate change and evolution. In essence, if you accept these concepts, you are pro-science; if you deny them, you are anti-science. True as that may be, this myopic view ignores a wide world of science, some of which is at odds with many beliefs popular on the left.

The time has come for Democrats to remove the beam from their own eyes, so to speak. Taking up the mantle of scientific liberalism—that is, adopting an evidence-based view of reality in pursuit of progressive policy—would serve both the strategic purposes of the Democratic Party in the menacing face of Trumpism, as well as the existential interests of humanity.

Take homeopathy, for example. Developed in the late 18th century by the German doctor Samuel Hahnemann, homeopathy is the dosing of a patient with a natural substance (e.g. white arsenic, deadly nightshade, poison ivy) in such a small quantity that it has been effectively diluted out of existence. In other words, there are no active ingredients in homeopathic remedies. They are basically just water. Sugar pills. Nothing more. Hahnemann’s pre-science idea is derived from the so-called “law of similars,” the idea that the key to curing an illness lies in infinitesimally small doses of substances that are harmful to healthy people in large doses. The smaller the dose, the more potent the remedy. If this sounds bonkers, that’s because it is. There is no scientific debate. Thousands of studies and meta-analyses have confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt that homeopathy is bunk. Yet, more than a quarter of Americans continue to believe in its efficacy, liberals being the worst offenders. Until last year, the Green Party even promoted homeopathy by name in its official platform. In May, it replaced that endorsement with the phrase “alternative health care approaches,” which is really just a less precise way to promote the same debunked nonsense with the added benefit of plausible deniability.

So, what’s the harm in entertaining anti-science views when it comes to so-called alternative treatments like homeopathy? After all, people should be free to throw their own money away. And since there are no active ingredients, homeopathy can’t really hurt anybody, can it? In fact, homeopathy is so ineffective at doing, well, anything at all, that science geeks across the world have staged massive collective “overdoses” of homeopathy in order to demonstrate its impotence. To date, not one person has been harmed—or healed, for that matter—from any of these mass ingestions. But the fact that it doesn’t work is exactly what makes it so dangerous. Many pharmacies sell homeopathic and other alternative remedies alongside real medicine. Consumers are entitled to a reasonable expectation that treatments sold in modern pharmacies have at least demonstrated a modicum of efficacy beyond placebo. Selling snake oil on the same shelf as real drugs betrays that trust. This is a consumer protection issue if there ever was one. Democrats should be all over it.

The liberal obsession with things that are “natural” or “organic” often also clashes with science. That conflict has come to a boil over one of the most urgent global issues: food. I suspect what liberals are really after by using those terms is “healthy.” The trouble is that “natural” is decidedly not a synonym for “healthy.” Arsenic is natural. Formaldehyde is natural. Conversely, just because a product is processed, packaged, genetically modified, and full of preservatives does not mean it is unhealthy... "https://newrepublic.com/article/1397...nce-not-really

As monumental as these failures of scientific literacy have been, perhaps the most damaging and confounding has been the left’s quixotic fight against nuclear power. There is a Shakespearean quality in the fact that one of the environmental movement’s biggest victories in the past 50 years—crippling the expansion of nuclear power—has actually done irreparable harm to the environment. On second thought, scratch the Shakespeare reference. It’s more like an episode of Black Mirror.

By now we’re all familiar with those iconic images of three-eyed mutant fish and ominous-looking cooling towers from The Simpsons. Almost exclusively negative portrayals in the popular culture, in concert with coordinated misinformation campaigns by environmental groups, have all but sealed the technology’s fate. By the 1990s, pollution, catastrophe, radiation, toxic green sludge, and super- (or sub-) human mutations had become so firmly associated with nuclear power that after the Watts Bar reactor in Tennessee went live in 1996, it would be 20 years before another plant would come online in the U.S. Of course, it’s not just The Simpsons’s fault. But when an entire generation grows up imagining that the only thing standing in the way of a Chernobyl-scale meltdown is the slip of a finger attached to a Duff-guzzling buffoon, it’s not hard to see why the public has become so wary of investing in the technology.

What’s so strange about all this is that none of the hallmarks of nuclear power in the popular imagination have anything to do with nuclear power in reality. Those gigantic towers spewing white clouds into the atmosphere? That’s not pollution. It’s water vapor. Nuclear power plants are responsible for exactly zero greenhouse gas emissions. Zero. How’s that for clean energy? That glowing ooze you see in the movies that finds its way into water sources and destroys ecosystems and births supervillains? That’s not even a thing. It doesn’t exist. A typical reactor produces in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 tons of waste (mostly spent fuel rods and contaminated incidentals like gloves and tools) per year that is usually stored on site. As far as large-scale energy sources go, that’s so tiny as to barely even register. What’s more, that waste is extremely valuable and can be recycled many times over to continue producing energy for years. Compare that to a coal plant in the U.S., which produces a staggering 125,000 tons of ash and 193,000 tons of sludge every single year.
Nuclear power plants are responsible for exactly zero greenhouse emissions. Zero. How’s that for clean energy?

Well, what about Chernobyl and Fukushima? Safety concerns have been the biggest hurdle facing nuclear since the world’s first plant was commissioned in 1954. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, just announced that the Indian Point nuclear plant operating just 30 miles north of New York City will be shut down amid safety concerns. The ironic thing is that, of the few legitimate reservations to be had about nuclear power (mostly centered on its high cost), safety is absolutely, certifiably not one of them. Even if we include extreme outliers like Chernobyl that have virtually nothing in common with current industry standards and practices, nuclear is indisputably the safest form of energy in existence. Yes, that includes wind and solar.

To be clear, wind and solar are vital technologies that we should be shoveling money at like there’s no tomorrow. But the depressing facts are these: For more than 60 years we’ve had access to one of the cleanest, safest, most environmentally friendly forms of energy available. And the reputed party of science and environmentalism has fought tooth and nail against it every step of the way. The damage inflicted has been lasting and severe. Energy vacuums are always filled. For each nuclear reactor proposal protested in the streets or that languished and died at the feet of lawmakers, something else took its place. In America, that means that coal, the dirtiest and deadliest source of all, overwhelmingly filled the void. And still today, only 30 percent of Democrats support increased use of nuclear power, compared to 54 percent of Republicans. Imagine the accusations of science-denial that would be hurled at Republicans if these roles were reversed... https://newrepublic.com/article/1397...nce-not-really

"If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth." - Ronald Reagan

Re: Democrats are the Party of Science?

I think Evensaul is once agian thinking with his tribe and not with his head.

Here is the real truth of the matter: Politics is not based on science.

No political party was founded on some scientific principle. They are political. They reflect the opinions, thoughts, and feelings of the populous. They can only be as scientific as the public is willing to accept. If people like Evensaul rant and rave that global warming is a conspiracy, then some politician is bound to repreent that viewpoint. No one gets elected by being the best scientist. There are a few sceintists in the halls of congress, but not many. Most of them are lawers, and that makes sense, since congress's primary duty is making law.

But honestly, government is not supposed to be run by scientists, its run by the people through their representatives, and if the people want to ignore science, well, the people get to do that. And even if we don't, science doesn't tell us what we should want in life or what is right or wrong. It just tells us that if you do X, then you should expect X to happen. So it can be helpfult to predict the outcome of actions. So govenrment should use sceince to it's advantage, but it should not be governed by it.

Evensauls arguments are daft, but it really doesn't matter. He's either just hacking on topics of interest or he's simply trying to be a good cheerleader for his tribe. The topic of the thread is just empty rhetoric IMO. The Democrats are not the party of sceince, neither are the republicans, nor should they be. Both should respect and understand sceince, but neither should be beholden to it.